Pondering Herb and Jamaal

Herb and Jamaal, 2013-09-09.

This strip cost me an hour and a half of my life that I'll never get back. That might not seem possible to you, but let me run you through it.

You see panel three there? Jamaal J. Jamaal. That's his name. The obvious question sprang to mind, and I thought it would be the work of moments to discover if the J did stand for Jamaal. But it turns out that information about Herb and Jamaal is somewhat hard to come by. Or at least it was.

You see, my first stop was Wikipedia. And it told me nothing. There was a Herb and Jamaal article, but it was a stub, with just a bit copied from the author bio on Creators Syndicate. So I searched on. Creators Syndicate had no character listing. GoComics had no character listing.

I scoured Google to try to find someone anywhere who knew the names of the characters. No one did. So I went back through the archives, finding references to each character I could, so that I could fill in some information on the Wikipedia page.

It's infuriatingly difficult. There are characters who show up again and again without anyone saying their names. I couldn't find a single instance of anyone calling Herb's son by name or talking about him in the third person. There's a guy who I thought was a blind priest who turned out to be neither blind nor a priest. And I still don't know his name. I found the names of the taxi driver and the postal worker though, neither of whom I even knew was a character before that.

So now I'm putting the call out. If you know anything about Herb and Jamaal, please add it to the Wikipedia page. Don't let this happen to me again!